Lozen was a Chihenne-Chiricahua Apache warrior, shaman, and sage, or seer. She was born in the 1840s ECD*, in a section of New Mexico/Arizona/Northern Mexico known at that time as Apacheria, within sight of the Sacred Mountain near Ojo Caliente where the People began. Some reports place her birth in the late 1840s.

Lozen was a person of many talents, on and off the battlefield. She was also a gifted seer and shaman. Her guidance was sought by many far and wide, and her advice to them was always true. It was while performing her duties as a medicine woman for a Mescalero woman in childbirth that she was not able to perform her usual rituals prior to her band going into battle. Because they did not know the enemy's whereabouts, the band was ambushed, and her brother was killed. Many of her people believed that such a tragedy would not have befallen them had Lozen been available, among them, for guidance.

Lozen, another Warm Springs Apache woman and the sister of the renowned chief Victorio, became legendary both as a warrior and as a shaman. She had what the Apaches called "Power," supernatural abilities on the battlefield and in spiritual communication. According to Peter Aleshire (Woman Warrior: The Story of Lozen, Apache Warrior and Shaman), Lozen fought in more campaigns against the Mexicans and the Americans than any of the great Apache leaders such as Cochise, Mangas Coloradas, Juh, Chihuahua, Geronimo or her own brother, Victorio. "Lozen began fighting Mexican soldiers and scalp hunters, eternal enemies of her band, when she came of age in the 1840’s," said Aleshire. "After the Americans arrived in 1848 to lay claim to her homeland, she battled them as well."

Lozen fought beside Victorio when he and his followers rampaged against Americans, who had appropriated their homeland in west central New Mexico’s Black Mountains and had tried to confine her people, first, to Arizona’s San Carlos Reservation then to New Mexico’s Mescalero Apache Reservation.

As the band fled U. S. forces, Lozen inspired women and children, frozen in fear, to cross a surging Rio Grande. "I saw a magnificent woman on a beautiful horse—Lozen, sister of Victorio. Lozen the woman warrior!" said James Kaywaykla, a child at the time, riding behind his grandmother. "High above her head she held her rifle. There was a glitter as her right foot lifted and struck the shoulder of her horse. He reared, then plunged into the torrent. She turned his head upstream, and he began swimming." Immediately, the other women and the children followed her into the torrent. When they reached the far bank of the river, cold and wet, but alive, Lozen came to Kaywaykla’s grandmother. "You take charge, now," she said. "I must return to the warriors," who stood between their women and children and the onrushing cavalry. Lozen drove her horse back across the wild river and returned to her comrades.

According to Kaywaykla, "She could ride, shoot, and fight like a man, and I think she had more ability in planning military strategy than did Victorio." He also remembers Victorio saying, "I depend upon Lozen as I do Nana" (the aging patriarch of the band).

Late in Victorio’s campaign, Lozen left the band to escort a new mother and her newborn infant across the Chihuahuan Desert from Mexico to the Mescalero Apache Reservation, away from the hardships of the trail.

Equipped with only a rifle, a cartridge belt, a knife, and a three-day supply of food, she set out with the mother and child on a perilous journey through territory occupied by Mexican and U.S. Cavalry forces. En route, afraid that a gunshot would betray their presence, she used her knife to kill a longhorn, butchering it for the meat.

She stole a Mexican cavalry horse for the new mother, escaping through a volley of gunfire. She then stole a vaquero’s horse for herself, disappearing before he could give chase. She also acquired a soldier’s saddle, rifle, ammunition, blanket and canteen, and even his shirt. Finally, she delivered her charges to the reservation.

According to Kimberly Moore Buchanan's book Apache Women Warriors, Lozen fought beside Nana and his handful of warriors in his two-month long bloody campaign of vengeance across southwestern New Mexico in 1881. Just before the fighting began, Nana said of Lozen, "Though she is a woman, there is no warrior more worthy than the sister of Victorio."

Lozen also fought beside Geronimo after his breakout from the San Carlos reservation in 1885, in the last campaign of the Apache wars. With the band pursued relentlessly, she used her power to locate their enemies—the U.S. and Mexican cavalries. According to Alexander B. Adams in his book Geronimo, "she would stand with her arms outstretched, chant a prayer to Ussen, the Apaches’ supreme deity, and slowly turn around." Lozen's prayer is translated in Eve Ball's book In the Days of Victorio:

Upon this earth
On which we live
Ussen has Power
This Power is mine
For locating the enemy.
I search for that Enemy
Which only Ussen the Great
Can show to me.

"By the sensation she felt in her arms, she could tell where the enemy was and how many they numbered", Adams writes.

The Apaches believe that when she was young, the spirits blessed her with horse magic, the gift of healing and the power to see enemies at a distance. In the Apaches’ thirty-year struggle to defend their homeland, they came to rely on her strength, wisdom, and supernatural abilities.

Because of her gift of far-sight, she was the only unmarried woman allowed to ride with the warriors and fight alongside them. After her beloved brother Victorio's death, she joined Geronimo's band of insurgents. With Geronimo and fifteen other warriors, she resisted the combined forces of the United States and Mexican armies, and the heavily armed civilian populations of New Mexico and Arizona Territories. She and the sixteen warriors, and seventeen women and children held out against a total of about nine thousand men.

The Apache Wars certainly qualified as the worst of times. Many of the names of the leaders who waged those battles are household words, but one who isn't well known was as exceptional as any of them. Lozen was the sister of the Warm Springs Apache chief Victorio. Besides the power to heal she was believed to possess the gift of Far Sight, the ability to sense the presence of enemies before they came into view. She was also reputed to have horse magic that made her an excellent horse thief.

"Reading about what Lozen and her people endured puts my petty, everyday problems into stark perspective. And it strikes me as amazing that the spirit of individuals who died 120 years ago can influence what we think and feel now. "

The Victorio War of 1879 and 1880 occurred because of the continuing collision of culures in the American Southwest and had its origins in the Grant administration's "Peace Policy" and the Indian Bureau's policy of concentration. The Warm Springs Apache were repeatedly denied their promised reservation at Ojo Caliente, New Mexico Territory. Their leader, Victorio, chose to fight rather than submit. The U.S. Army's job was to force submission. Victorio eluded the military for five months before bringing his people to Hembrillo Basin in the early months of 1880.

The Hembrillo Basin became the scene of the largest Apache-Cavalry battle of the Victorio War. On the evening of April 6,1880, two companies of " Buffalo Soldiers," Afro-American troopers of the 9th Cavalry, approached Victorio's camp and were ambushed by approximately 150 Apache warriors (Map #1).

The Hembrillo Battlefield is an excellent and well-preserved example of a battleground from the tragic Victorio War, the last major stand of the Warm Springs Apache in their homeland.

Second Lt. Walter Finley, Co G 9th Cavalry, echoed the sentiments of Col. Edward Hatch and many of the officers involved when he wrote in 1879:

"It is the old story, unjust treatment of the Indians by the Govt., treaties broken, promises violated and the Indians moved from one reservation to another against their will, until finally they break out and go on the war path and the Army is called in to kill them. It is hard to fight against and shoot down men when you know they are in the right and are really doing what our fathers did in the Revolution, fighting for their country."

They conceive the world to be permeated by supernatural power which has no intrinsic attribute of good or evil; its virtue resides in its potency. Power approaches people through the agency of a plant, animal, or natural phenomenon by means of a dream or other hallucinatory experience; its acceptance is frequently accompanied by an ordeal. Ritual instruction may be received directly from the power or from other shamans. Any person is a possible power recipient. Thus, Opler (1936:146) described the Mescaleros as "a tribe of shamans, active or potentially active."

i would love to spend time with them.. ive had quite a few past lives as a hopi indian and one i was a shaman.. i got kicked in the head by my horse and died.. no joke.. this life i am allergic to horse hair and terrified of them.. obviously you have been an indian many lives too..

i live in Australia and when i go out to the mountains all my past lives as an aborigine come to life.. i see my tribe surrounding me in full psychic vision.. its so calming.. mountains to me is where i am my most happiest.. the energy is so different and it just a good match for me.. and you like them too..

James Kaywaykla with his mother, Gouyen, and his stepfather, Kaytennae. This little family survived the Battle of Hembrillo and the massacre of Victorio's people at Tres Castillos. James Kaywaykla later said that "until I was about 10 years old I didn't know people died from anything except violence."

Sometime in the second half of the 19th century, a Mescalero Apache woman called Gouyen, or Wise Woman, tracked down a Comanche chief who had murdered and scalped her husband. She found her prey

celebrating his conquest in a victory dance around a nighttime campfire with his band. Somehow Gouyen stole right into the heart of the camp, into the middle of the celebration. She lured the chief, staggeringly drunk, into the night. She pounced on him like a mountain lion, ripping out his throat with her teeth. She then stabbed him and scalped him with his own knife. She stole his headband, breechclout and moccasins. She escaped on the chief’s black stallion, returning to her people, numb with exhaustion, but triumphant.

Gouyen, said her chief, "is a brave and good woman. She has done a braver thing than has any man among the Mescaleros. She has killed the Comanche chief; and she has brought his weapons and garments to her people. She has ridden his mount. Let her always be honored by my people." (See Eve Ball’s An Apache Odyssey: Indeh, where she recorded Gouyen’s story, kept alive in the tribe’s oral history by May Peso Second, a Mescalero chief’s daughter.) Gouyen’s coup held extraordinary importance because it gave a measure of revenge against the Comanches, who had driven the Mescaleros and other Apache groups from the Great Plains during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Later, Gouyen fought in a skirmish against a party of miners who had encamped near Cooke’s Peak, in southwestern New Mexico. "There was a shot and Suldeen [an Apache warrior] fell from his horse," James Kaywaykla, Gouyen’s son, told Eve Ball in an interview for her book In the Days of Victorio: Recollections of a Warm Springs Apache. "Kaytennae [Gouyen’s second husband and Kaywaykla’s step-father] leaped to the ground and dropped into an arroyo. Mother followed, with me behind her. Before we could overtake Kaytennae, she had her rifle in readiness. We heard two shots and knew that [Kaytennae] had accounted for two [miners]. As we passed the mouth of a side arroyo I saw the shadow of a rifle move. ‘Indah!’ [‘White Man!’] I shouted. Kaytennae was racing toward us, but it was Mother who got the first shot. There was no need for another."

Kaywaykla said, "…my mother’s place was at [Kaytennae’s] side. She prepared food, dressed wounds, and when necessary fought beside him as bravely as any man."